Friday, September 30, 2022

"Woke" K-12 Schools on American Military Bases

Schools on American military bases, educating almost 70,000 children of service personnel, push the same anti-racism curriculum found in America’s most liberal school districts, with the goal of preparing these students for lives dedicated to a global citizenship meant to displace American citizenship and the American way of life.

The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) employs thousands of teachers, and its budget exceeds $3.2 billion. Reflecting Department-wide priorities, the 2022 DoDEA “Blueprint for Continuous Improvement” strategic plan was recently updated to emphasize “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as “Core Values” for the system.

As part of delivering on the Defense Department’s diversity agenda, the Pentagon sponsored an “Equity and Access” conference in 2021, where teachers from around the military system delivered talks about promoting queer theory, “antiracism,” global citizenship, and left-wing activism generally. Antiracism was the dominant topic of discussion, but we must understand that “antiracism” does not mean, “not being racist.” On the contrary, the new working definition of “antiracism”—given to us by Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi—means assuming that all American society is shot through with racism, that every white person is racist, and that denial of racism is evidence of racism.

Thanks to a whistleblower, the Claremont Institute received more than fifty presentations from the 2021 DoDEA conference. The content was, to put it gently, enlightening. Military base teachers instructed their colleagues how to insert antiracist ideology into their classrooms through a simple, two-step process. First, cultivate a sense of guilt and discomfort in students through subtle accusations. Second, replace the previous complacency and comfort with a commitment to activism and a sense of mission about restructuring society and the world.

Trainers emphasized the first step of cultivating “critical conversations” and discomfort in more than a dozen presentations. They hued closely to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Let’s Talk” handbook, which describes critical conversations as discussions “about the ways that injustice affects our lives and our society” and explorations about “the relationship between identity and power, that traces the structures that privilege some at the expense of others, that helps students think through the actions they can take to create a more just, more equitable, world.”

Such conversations can begin in countless ways, but they must always take place within the antiracism framework. Injustice means disparities between group outcomes—disparities to the disadvantage of favored minorities. Blacks suffer from some health problems at rates higher than whites—so DoDEA has a presentation on health equity—“We All Have Shoes: But Do They Fit? Health Education Equity.” In “Be Well Do Well,” a presenter emphasizes questions like “what aspect of your racial or ethnic identity makes you the proudest?” and “Have you ever experienced a situation where your racial or ethnic identity seemed to contribute to a problem or an uncomfortable situation?”

Once students are saddled with white guilt, teachers must give them their marching orders. In “Combating 1-Sided Narratives (Decolonize the Curriculum),” AP language teacher Gregory DeJardin insists that teachers must become activists themselves, since nothing naturally bends toward justice “without us bending it.” Decolonizing the curriculum involves expunging old books like Dr. Seuss or Shakespeare from the curriculum and replacing them with antiracist children’s books. Equitable bookshelves must be created, including texts from disrupttexts.org and socialjusticebooks.org, which feature books such as Rise Up: The Art of Protest and What We Believe: A Black Lives Matter Principles Activity Book. The “‘REDI’ for Change: Antiracism in Action” talk emphasized urging white people to confess their crimes of privilege and silence. “I was reading Me and White Supremacy,” said one teacher, and what it teaches “about white silence, and I realized the damage I was doing by my white silence.”

Decolonizing the curriculum could involve changing what history class is about. A focus on inventors or discoverers, for instance, leaves students with only a white-American view of the world, according to one student, since so many of the greatest American inventors have been white men. Decolonization of the classroom should emphasize all the great black inventors or stop focusing on inventors altogether. Bending the arc of justice requires a definite change in emphasis, if not a series of lies, noble or otherwise.

When schools do not allow such books to be taught, trainers encouraged teachers to use their academic freedom to integrate radical readings. Teachers “do have some influence,” one trainer said, over the books they choose “for read-aloud . . . independent reading, book clubs, literature circles.”

All of this is done not simply for the good of equity, but to cultivate a new kind of student. “Global citizenship education is a means to combat these ideas and practices,” one teacher maintains. Children will think their own country is fundamentally racist and in need of systemic change, but those kids can become attached to a higher ideal than the nation—an understanding of humanity as such.

It is unwise to undermine the attachment military children feel toward their country. It is unjust to put lies at the heart of their education. Yet our military educators are doing both. The country will soon reap the sad harvest of this planting season.

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Washington Post Urges Colleges To Offer ‘Climate Anxiety’ Counseling

On September 12, The Washington Post highlighted the “critical” need for what it called “climate stress counseling services” at universities across the country.

“It was hard to feel as though there was a ‘level of understanding of how dire the situation is,’” one student told the Post.

Oh Lord, here come the sob stories.

Eco-anxiety is commonly used to describe people’s concerns about ‘climate change’, but psychologists say it is better to use more general terms such as ‘climate stress’ and ‘climate distress’ — terms that encompass the array of feelings someone may have in response to climate change,” according to The Post.

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The Post indicated that these “counseling services” are to “validate” students’ feelings of helplessness and anxiety over climate change.

So yes, that means that taxpayer money that goes into public universities is paying for students to have their feelings over climate change “validated.”

What the frick is happening to our society!?

More lunacy indicated that these university support groups needed places to “manage despair and grief related to the future of the planet.”

At meetings, participants would choose an object in nature they resonate with — including leaves, flowers, twigs, stones, shells — sparking conversation and allowing students to connect to each other’s experiences.

To take it a step further, the Post indicated that “experts” suggested that counselors seek special training to help people with “eco-anxiety” as it takes a special type of psycho to think that people need therapy over ‘climate change’.

The Washington Post not only published this dumb story on its website but even spent money printing it out for the September 16 edition of the paper.

Sure, the climate may be experiencing some changes but dwelling on it and having “support groups” to talk about twigs, flowers and stones is not going to do anything except validate stupid feelings.

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Arizona Points the Way to Greater Education Freedom

It’s vitally important for America that states up their game in public education, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said during an appearance on “The Kevin Roberts Show.”

In an interview on Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ podcast, the two-term Republican governor began a discussion of education policy and school choice in Arizona by acknowledging the problems faced by the nation in K-12 schools. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

To set an example, Ducey said, he aimed to put Arizona at the forefront of innovation by giving parents more choices in their children’s education.

“K-12 education, I believe, in so many places is failing. Across the country, it has been flatlined since the mid-’80s,” Ducey told Roberts. “In America, we very rarely solve a problem. We innovate out of these problems. And Arizona has tried to be on the leading edge of new ideas that not only provide choice for the parents, but also have results.”

As The Daily Signal previously reported, Heritage’s new Education Freedom Report Card ranks Arizona No. 2 among all states and the District of Columbia in overall education freedom after considering categories such as school choice, transparency, regulatory freedom, and spending.

On “The Kevin Roberts Show,” Ducey stressed the effectiveness of using government resources to empower parents to decide where is best to educate their children. He outlined the first steps he said would help improve the nation’s education system.

“This idea of public education is about educating the public,” Ducey said. “We’ve seen in Arizona, and I think … if you can start with the idea of the charter schools—the public schools with private management where [schools] can hire the teachers—and you see these education entrepreneurs that come out of these great programs … and they want to open up a school.”

Desire for parental choice in education has been on the rise, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, and Ducey expressed discontent with school choice being a partisan issue. Instead, he said, it has been driven by resilient parents who challenged the current system.

“I don’t think this is a Republican issue,” Ducey said, adding: “That choice movement, if anyone’s seen [the 2010 documentary] “Waiting for Superman,” … this was a parent movement. And some of the first and greatest successes were in the toughest minority areas.”

“The stories of Harlem in the documentary, to this day, bring a tear to your eye,” the Arizona governor said. “And when you see somebody that knows that their child’s entire future is based on a lottery … I think these are things we should reject in our country.”

Roberts and Ducey also discussed how education should be part of cultivating good American citizens and provide a stepping stone to a better country.

“This incredible idea that you can pursue happiness in this country, in security, in safety, is still the best idea put forward,” Ducey said. “And K-12 education is a part of continuing it. And when you talk about the liberal arts … [it] is the formation of the full citizen … those foundations and grounding that also have that participation, is where the strength of the country, and any state, is.”

In closing, Ducey reflected on his two terms as Arizona governor since 2015 and his pride in taking his state to “the gold standard of educational freedom.” (Because of Arizona’s term limit for its governor, he can’t run for a third four-year term.)

“It took all of eight years to get here,” Ducey said. “Persistence is part of it, and also a great team. I’ve really been blessed with a great staff … and on this one, we were able to get this over the finish line.”

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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